Numbers - Again. Looking up.

21-0-28. With school in session a couple weeks now it is time to be asking about numbers. How many students this year versus last? What are class sizes looking like? How are the numbers?
Glad you asked. The first number you might be interested in is 60. If you have had that many birthdays you can get a free pass to all Marietta City Schools’ sports events. This policy was in place last year and was continued. A nice bonus for having stuck around that long.
Then there are the total student figures. It gets a bit tricky here. On August 22 of ‘07 the official count was 2974. That was down from the previous year’s 3027. Then on December 12 the number was 2927. And on May 6 of ’08 the official count was 2936.
You can see quite a lot of fluctuation over the course of the year. The beginning number this year is 2987. Up 13 from the beginning number last year. Noticeably, this is the first increase in first day enrollment in memory. Perhaps as long as 30 years. What does this mean? Good question.
Asking questions about numbers yielded far more information than one might imagine. For instance, over the course of the year there are on average about 400 students who must be accounted for as they move in and out of the district.
Sometimes they become incarcerated. Some are on open enrollment. Some move in and out of foster homes and some choose home schooling or community schools.
What’s a community school? It’s not a home school and it’s not a building in the community. Probably a topic for further discussion as we dig deeper, but for the moment just imagine that your student enrolls in a program that he/she attends via computer.
The community schools are sanctioned by the state of Ohio but not subject to the same responsibility and reporting requirements that regular schools must demonstrate. Here’s the not so good part from the district standpoint.
The local district must pay at least in part for tuition, study materials, a computer and other associated costs. Last year this area of expenditures cost Marietta City Schools about $167,000.
We will look more closely at this another time.
These questions also uncovered a phantom building in our district. Really a cyber building where we house students for state reporting purposes that don’t really fit anywhere else, but we must keep track of them on a daily basis. What a nightmare!
Speaking of buildings, our “Central Receiving” building has drawn some interest as we move forward to dispose of it and consolidate that operation. The appraisal number there is $160,000 if you might have some interest yourself.
Then there are some savings numbers worth mentioning. Owing to a change implemented this year where middle school and high school students are responsible for purchasing locks for their lockers we have saved about 6 weeks of custodial time and two weeks of secretarial time.
That’s how long it took in years past to change all the combinations on the lockers and record the changes. Not sure why we weren’t smart enough to do this decades ago.
Apart from the savings, the students get to keep the locks for future use. The number at the top of this letter is my hall locker combination. My gym locker was 15-27-4. Now if I can just remember where I put the locks.
We have some class size issues to address. Sometimes these are readily solvable and at other times not. More on that subject later.